The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.

Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.

And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).

Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.

No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*].

Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English.

The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important".

[*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...

What I've found is that LLMs are excellent tools for:

- Spitting out white collar corporate speak that sounds plausible to other corporate speakers

- Hugely accelerating the process of going through academia which, except for a few specific cases, is essentially years of copy/pasting

- Writing code as long as such code as been written many times before

- Figuring out which one of the 10 ads and 12 misleading links in a web search is the one you're looking for

- Summarizing a book in ten paragraphs so you don't have to read it

...which turns out a lot of people defined as "thinking". I don't agree with that. But in either case, not "too much" is being offloaded: it's all of it.

For Xbox being what it is today, which is mostly about the subscription and not the hardware console or the exclusives, you have to compound their acquisition frenzy of 2018-2020 or so, which totals about 75 billion+.

They didn't want the developers nor the catalog. What Microsoft wanted is to change the economics and dynamics of the entire games industry, to make it Netflix-like (play what's in the catalog today, pay monthly even if you don't play anything) vs. what Steam offers (purchase once, own "forever", even if it's de-listed).

But that didn't play out. Optimistic estimates put total revenue for Xbox since then in the 20B ballpark. At a ~5% margin (as other commenters have pointed out) the profit is about 1B dollars.

It means that after almost a decade, the entirety of Xbox is in the red for about 74 billion dollars, which is 74 billion away from breaking even.

Steam still dominates PC gaming. Xbox consoles can't be more irrelevant today.

This isn't about over-hiring or AI. It was a bet at the executive level that went horribly wrong. They can still do things like selling IPs at a bargain to compensate, but still. Horribly wrong.

Note: Microsoft doesn't publish hard factual data so the numbers above are somewhat speculative (e.g. "analysts data")

They're allowing comments and obviously the first thing there is a scam.

No way any goodwill on the Internet is going to prosper. Not anymore.

What got me out of academia (yup, I was a professor) was:

Do you have vast field experience and want to get into the classroom to teach how it's really done? Tough luck, you should've spent your time writing papers.

No matter how much you know or how good you are, everything is about feeding the maximalist machine, if you're an outlier, worse people with better "scores", more papers and never leaving faculty will forever beat you until they retire.

I took a good look at the publishing process. Absolutely everything about it was back-channeling to carefully select the topic, scope and reviewers of a paper to get it through the process. Goodhart's Law at its finest.

Advice given to me: "aim for a lower rank and be happy with teaching the whole thing while the old professor takes a nap in the corner".

AI or not AI, anything destroying that self-perpetuating bureaucracy is welcome.

As for the remaining 99%, maybe they should stop pretending they know (and giving advice) about navigating a typical production code base.

1% are the absolutely brilliant minds that academia was originally created for. People that, without a doubt, leave their mark in the vast corpus of human knowledge. I consider myself fortunate for meeting and learning from them, and I thank the academia ecosystem for that.

But the remaining 99% are the maximalists, as described in the article. More papers/students/grants, then repeat. Worse enough, they're absolutely useless outside of academia, as they never did anything at all outside that bubble.

An embarrassing lot of CS professors would stumble around your average production codebase.

I think AI is just the final nail in the coffin for the latter bunch, as they have been dogs eating their own tail for decades already.

That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.

It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.

My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.

Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.

The original post sums it pretty well, such big output inherently meant big effort, which was a proxy for good faith. Now that's gone.

Not my point either. I was just referring to the tooling changing over time, with the discipline constantly evolving forward nonetheless.

But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.

Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).

And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.